King and Country Preview

King & Country is to be a medieval war strategy game for Risc os computers. Unlike Exodus, King and Country will feature realtime rather than turn-based play. The game will support single and multiple human player modes with support for internet/ethernet multiplayer games nearly finished. In single player mode, the player selects one of two opposing armies and then plays through a campaign of 12 levels (with the possibility of one or more hidden levels).

Software 7 are currently working towards a release date of late October 1998. However, they say there's still a fair bit of work to be done on the game so keep checking these pages! There'll also be more screenshots of the game so far appearing here soon.

An early game screenshot

Gameplay:

In multi-player mode, players connect two or more computers together using serial cables, modem+phone lines or ethernet cabling and battle head to head, or co-operatively against the computer (or another team of humans). Special multi-player scenarios will be provided which have objectives (this is a feature we believe to be unique to King & Country ATM).

The game relies largely on realistic style warfare using conventional means but includes some fantasy elements to add some 'spice' to battles (not overdone as in WarCraft II though).

Planned units include:

[list of units coming shortly]

Both single and multi player success reply upon succesful management of resources (gold, wood and stone) which are harvested by peasants, in order to construct and maintain working bases and defences. All bases center around the castle, which in early levels is small and weak but progresses to a mighty palace, for training soldiers and overseeing everything. Other buildings like blacksmiths, watch towers, temples and guard towers are added to provide defence and other services.

Planned buildings include:

[structures list coming shortly]

At present K&C is only being developed to run on the Risc PC, support for slower machines with less memory etc. will be included as soon as possible (hopefully before release, or shortly afterwards). The game runs in an 800x600 screen mode with 256 colours, and as such requires 1MB+ of VRAM. About 8Mb of conventional RAM will be required. The game will probably ship on a CD ROM (or a huge collection of floppies).

The game uses a fixed update system locking the framerate and updating as many units and structures as possible each frame. This leads to a very smooth and consistent fell to the game.

The networking is based on a client-server protocol so that if the game leader is running an SA RiscPC or RiscPC II then other players only using basic RiscPCs will still enjoy a fast game.

A map editor will be supplied with the game to enable creation of custom multi and single player maps.

Introduction and cut scenes will feature high quality rendered video scenes and there's also a possibility of digitised video clips.

Screenshots and King and Country banner image are ©1998 Software 7 and are used with permission.